Search Results for ""

The prime distance pd(n) of a nonnegative integer n is the absolute difference between n and the nearest prime. It is therefore true that pd(p)=0 for primes p. The first few ...

Catastrophe theory studies how the qualitative nature of equation solutions depends on the parameters that appear in the equations. Subspecializations include bifurcation ...

The term "characteristic" has many different uses in mathematics. In general, it refers to some property that inherently describes a given mathematical object, for example ...

Lagrange multipliers, also called Lagrangian multipliers (e.g., Arfken 1985, p. 945), can be used to find the extrema of a multivariate function f(x_1,x_2,...,x_n) subject to ...

A direct search method of optimization that works moderately well for stochastic problems. It is based on evaluating a function at the vertices of a simplex, then iteratively ...

Determination of whether predicate P(x_1,...,x_n) is true or false for any given values of x_1, ..., x_n is called its decision problem. The decision problem for predicate ...

A piecewise polynomial function that can have a locally very simple form, yet at the same time be globally flexible and smooth. Splines are very useful for modeling arbitrary ...

A transformation T (a.k.a., map, function) over a domain D takes the elements X in D to elements Y in T(D), where the range (a.k.a., image) of T is defined as ...

Let pi_(m,n)(x) denote the number of primes <=x which are congruent to n modulo m (i.e., the modular prime counting function). Then one might expect that ...

Let the divisor function d(n) be the number of divisors of n (including n itself). For a prime p, d(p)=2. In general, sum_(k=1)^nd(k)=nlnn+(2gamma-1)n+O(n^theta), where gamma ...